Explanation: At night,
tilting a flashlight up under your chin hides the
glowing bulb from the direct view of your friends.
Light from the bulb still reflects from your face though, and can
give you a startling appearance.
Spiral
Galaxy NGC 1068
may be playing a similar trick on a
cosmic scale,
hiding a central powerful source of x-rays -- likely a
supermassive black hole -- from direct view.
X-rays are
still scattered into our line-of-sight
though, by a dense torus of material surrounding the black hole.
The scenario is
supported by x-ray data from the
Chandra Observatory combined with a Hubble Space
Telescope optical image in
this
false-color composite picture.
Optical data in red shows spiral structure across NGC 1068's
inner 7 thousand light-years with the x-ray data overlaid in blue
and green.
A hot wind of gas streaming from the galaxy's core
is seen as the broad swath of x-ray emission while material
lit up
by the hidden black hole source is within the central
cloud of more intense x-rays.
Also well known
as M77, NGC 1068 lies a mere 50 million
light-years away toward the constellation Cetus.